Love, like music, lives in the imagination, but it is no less real for that.

-- Robert C. Solomon About Love

Even in Darkness

Even in darkness, love
shows the circumference
of the world, lightning
quivering on horizons
in the summer night.

-- Wendell Berry

waterfall 1

Song of a Man Who Has Come Through

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world
Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge blade inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.

-- D.H. Lawrence

lotus 1

The key to the hidden lands beyond those veils lies in the letting go of all hope, fear and expectation. The portal opens when one realizes that one no longer needs to seek it and must simply open to that which is already fully present. In that vastness in which nothing is hidden and nothing needs to be revealed, all is transparent, clear, and the doors, in response, open everywhere.

-- Ian Baker The Heart of the World

the trollers

Photo by Mark Barry

Mark Barry's The Trollers lithographic process on Flickr



ionarts: Making a Litho

twilight shore

And this is a universal law: a living thing can be healthy, strong and fruitful only when bounded by a horizon.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations
Translated by R.J. Hollingdale

sandcastle

I lifted the curtain,
                    looked out ―
and was looking within me.
A sandbox I saw,
                    a spade,
                                        a castle
and a boy building it;
                                        he is building it still.
The game was
                    and is:
it began
                    and is still in its beginning.
The boy sat down,
                    looked behind him ―
and gave a start;
                    at the window stood a man,
familiar,
                    with a strange look on his face.
What happened there?
Past and future
                    gazed into a COMMON PRESENT.
The boy went on with his play,
                    I let the curtain fall.
No window anymore,
                    no view ―
no within.
Only the body I was given,
                    reflecting on its surface
                                        the distance between me and the boy.
Each holding in his yesterday the line engraved,
                                        the anteroom of tomorrow
                    from which every now is born.
Man and boy ― me ―
                                        all in one;
                    from somewhere towards something new.
                    In that same window,
                                        staring each at each.

-- Matti Itkonen, from "Does What Has Been Survive?" in Analecta Husserliana LXXXII
Translated by Robert MacGilleon

the beach

there angels flew

As for me, I am inclined to believe that flight is a warm wind before being a wing. I do not reject the teachings of a dreamer who believes that a sylph will teach him what a bird is. In dynamic imagination, the first flying creature in a dream is the dreamer himself. If someone or something accompanies him in flight, it is a sylph, a cloud, a shadow; it is a veil, an aerial form, enveloped and enveloping, happy to be undefined and to live at the edge of the visible and the invisible. To see birds of flesh and feathers fly, the dreamer must climb back up toward day and assume once more his human, clear, logical thoughts. But if the clarity is too great, the spirits of sleep will disappear. It is for poetry to find them again, as though they were reminiscences of a beyond. A person who does not forget can make no mistake on this point: the dream, like Toussenel's God, creates the soaring spirit before creating the bird.

If purity, light, and the sky's splendor summon up pure and winged creatures; if, through an inversion that is only possible in the realm of values, the purity of a creature gives purity to the world in which it lives, we can easily understand that the imaginary wing takes on the colors of the sky and that the sky is a world of wings. We will murmur like the sleeping Boaz, with the soul's voice:

There angels flew, but darkly, of course,
For at times there was seen, going by in the night,
Something blue, that might be a wing.

-- Gaston Bachelard Air and Dreams
Translated by Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell

the little world

My only talent, if you can call it that in my case, is that I love this little world inside the thick walls of this playhouse, and I'm fond of the people who work in this little world. Outside is the big world, and sometimes the little world succeeds in reflecting the big one so that we understand it better. Or perhaps, we give the people who come here a chance to forget for a while, for a few short moments, the harsh world outside. Our theater is a little room of orderliness, routine, care and love. I don't know why I feel so comically solemn this evening. I can't explain how I feel, so I'd best be brief.

-- Oscar Ekdahl, in Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander

Rick Moody on Fanny and Alexander

waterdrop

The Island

You pillars of light mournful and beautiful,
sowing the ocean with statues and necklaces,
calcareous eye, eidolon of opening water, cry
of petrel's bereavement, sea tooth, Oceanic
bride of the wind―O separate rose cut
from the rose tree, stripped petal by petal
till a sea change was wrought and all was
archipelago, green diadem, natural star,
alone in your dynasty's solitude
inapprehensible to the last, elusive, abandoned,
like a waterdrop falling, like a grape, like a sea.

-- Pablo Neruda
Translated by Ben Belitt

Element It Has

It may not be the same, what we appear
to thrive or slow or fade in, though across
its white expanses steadily we stare;

the only common element it has
is loss, and it may differ in the terms
it gives it. And it thickens with the days,

thins in the night as if it more than seems
a carbon thing, afflicted, prone to what?
To us, as if obscurely hopes or harms

can come to it, as if it walks the street
in love, abashed, abused, as if it, too,
expands to wonder at the point of it,

contracts to desperation in the blue
morning, helplessly expands anew.

-- Glyn Maxwell

via The New Yorker

Glyn Maxwell

sea oats

It seems to me that almost every artist finds some subdivision of nature or experience more congenial to his temperament than any other. To me it has been the sea―or rather those regions adjacent to the sea―beaches, dunes, swampy coasts . . .

There is another aspect of an artist's choice of his subject matter which I think could be profitably explored. It is that I believe he is affectively related to certain forms and designs. I believe his choice is channeled by the compulsion to find an objective vehicle for inward plastic images. I certainly do not know why, but I am stirred by certain geometrical relationships, certain rectangular forms and arabesques out of which grow particular harmonies and rhythms. In deciding what subject I shall paint I am irresistibly drawn to objects which contain the skeleton of this type of plastic structure. Whether I am spending the summer on Barnegat Bay or on Cape Cod or merely sketching along the Harlem River, I somehow contrive to find the exact set of lines and contours which this inner appetite demands.

-- Julian Levi, from "Before Paris and After" in Magazine of Art December 1940

Love is the last element of form which takes us to the formless, a quality of the mind which reflects the nature of the heart and is the essential connection between the two. When love fills the mind, it opens into the heart.

-- Stephen Levine Healing into Life and Death